ACSA doubles IT spend

The Airports Company of SA (ACSA) plans to spend R200 million this year on its IT agenda. This is up 174% on last year's R73 million budget.

Speaking yesterday at the company's financial results presentation, ACSA MD Monhla Hlahla noted the strategic changes it had made to its IT environment.

"For a long time ACSA outsourced its IT requirements. Over the last two years we have successfully sought to bring our IT back in-house. If you think about it, airports are nothing else but a range of technologies that facilitate the transport of people from one spot to another," she said.

ACSA's 2006/7 annual report says its increased IT budget will be used to implement business transformation initiatives that will contribute to business growth and efficiency.

"Business process re-engineering, process mapping and business intelligence coupled with complete business support will be the critical catalysts in accomplishing this greatly anticipated revolution," says ACSA.

ACSA's IT transformation initiatives are divided into three parts.

For its programme management office (PMO), the organisation intends to adopt sound maturity models that will enable it to progress towards an enterprise PMO. This will encourage a culture of implementing business improvement projects in a quality-controlled environment.

The PMO functions include: risk management, change and communication management, project sponsor relations, project management, IT value management, IT delivery acceleration, IT governance and quality standards, and quality assurance management.

To ensure the company's divisions are working towards organisational - rather than divisional - objectives, ACSA says it is implementing an Oracle enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

"The ERP system will ensure accurate data, timely information and proper interfaces of the complex business functions through a common process planning and monitoring platform."

ACSA says the blueprint phase of this implementation - largely encompassing business process redesign - was concluded at the end of July. Once the conceptual design is approved, the planned three-year implementation will be executed.

"The stringent management of [people, processes and product initiatives] will ensure ACSA realises shorter time to production, measurable business benefits, and a rapid return on technology investment," it says.

The last part of its IT strategy relates to the Airport Management Centre (AMC) project.

ACSA's head of airport operations Bongani Maseko explains: "The AMC is a collaboration of all the operations that participate in the functioning of an airport. We started it 18 months ago and its aim is to improve the timeliness of our departures, improve operations and map progress against about 180 key performance indicators."

The IT division's primary objective in this project is to ensure the provision of an integrated, rigorous, scalable and reliable technology solution to meet the airport's operation objectives. These objectives are process improvement, data accuracy and transparency, says ACSA.

So far, ACSA has completed the blueprint phase for the AMC solution and is now looking for an appropriate system to meet its requirements.